Can this drive be layed down on its side instead of upright? Is this WD drive able to be used in a horizontal position instead of standing up vertically like a book?
2133
First, HOWEVER you use your hard drive, it is spinning incredibly fast and likely to be housing a lot of your important data. It should be treated with RESPECT and placed where it CANNOT easily be bumped, knocked over, stepped on, or even be subject to significant vibration. Posts like yours make me wonder how many user complaints of drives failing are due to abuse. That being said: In my experience, I'd strongly advise you to consistently use the drive in the SAME orientation whenever you use it. So if you want to lay it on its side, fine. But do so from the first time you use it, and ALWAYS do that. These modern USB drives now run under some intense conditions, often with no fans, etc. No sense placing extra stress on them or their bearings, drive heads, etc. by running them both horizonally and vertically. (Such drives are just "ordinary" internal hard drives placed in cases with a USB interface to make them convenient to access externally, and make them portable. Such drives are placed in ordinary PC's in whatever orientation is convenient for the manufacturer -- most often horizontally ("on their side"), FWIW. (I've been fooling with PC's since IBM first came out with the standard IBM DOS PC in '82, and used seemingly innumerable hard drives in many configurations, as I was a "data geek" so I have some idea what I'm talking about here).
1392534
Amazon have been sending me the WD20EARS-00MVWB0!If you do buy it, please buy it thru my Amazon Store, its the same price and I get a small kickback from the sale.http://astore.amazon.com/brisperpag-20/detail/B002ZCXK0IGreat drive btw, use this for my main data partition and for an external backup drive on many servers.
1733949
You have a good eye. The drive is square in shape 5.5 x 0.5 x 5.5 in. Give or take a a bit on the depth. I don't really move it around much so I haven't considered a case, but I hope the measurements help.
508319
Looking at the board , look to the left of the two visible white SATA ports , positions 2 & 3 . Positions 0 & 1 are in an opposed position . They are sideways . I don't know the reasoning for this but I suppose because gigabyte wants you to use position 0 for the primary hard drive and position 1 for the secondary hard drive or primary cd/dvd drive. The two white SATA ports facing up are your secondary SATA ports for additional drives.
2097069
I noticed the same on mine when I was transferring a lot of data onto the new drive. It is very quiet now, although any large program installation will make the drive somewhat noisy. Placing it sideways will not change or help things. It's very quiet in normal usage.
670631
The drive is enclosed in its own case ready to be mounted in a drive bay. It does not come with an external case so its not suited to put on a desk top without an external case.
1662767
I don't think it will work as a vertical player, the DVD-CD disk would need to snap into place and be retained and this player has a 'drop in'tray.Most laptop style drives are set up with disk retention ...are you sure it is a full size drive that you need? Also most PC cases are designed to have the disk drive horizontal and those cases that go both ways normally are built for the drive to be kept horizontal.
1819010
Sure, you can use an external enclosure and use it as a backup drive. Just remember that it's a 2.5 inch drive (like in laptops), not a regular 3.5 inch (like in a pc).Cheers
956122
Normal installation is horizontal. If you mean vertical, it would be a little unwieldy when loading it.
506681
It is a SATA drive with a PCBoard converter to USB (located in base so can overheat & disconnect from computer frequently, so lay on side so air can flow)
1770072
Sure you can, you just have to buy an enclosure for it. But why not just buy an external HD directly? I think it's a bit of waste to use this drive as external storage.
91777
You can configure the drive however you like (raid 1 or 0) and it works stand-alone or daisy chained. It's a very flexible and reliable drive.
1773468
No, it requires a little effort. Both sides need to be removed and then one can access the drive. My unit failed out of the box. POS if you ask me.
124815
I used it as an external drive. Even if you can take the HD out, you still need a sata connecting cable ($8.66 for 2). It has a USB-3 cable which is faster than the conventional USB-2. I wonder why you would pay the price of an external drive and use it as an internal drive, which usually costs less for the same capacity. I bought a WD 4 TB internal drive as D:
1913912
@Tony I believe you could. You'd have to create two partitions on the drive, one formatted in HFS+ (for Mac) and the other in NTFS (for Windows). I have never done any such thing but it might be worth a try. Of course, as these drives have come so far down in price, why not just buy two, one for Mac and the other for Windows?
569958
yes, you can,I used mine that way for a while but I would suggest that you wrap the drive in some like a static bag if using a metal case.
151382
You could try... however, I do not think that the slots for the cases is deep enough to hold them in place if it were mounted horizontally. I tipped mine over and before it got anywhere near horizontal a few DVDs fell out. As it is completely full, I didn't want to make a big mess by putting it fully horizontal, so I cannot say definitively....